Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) architecture has been widely adopted by the avionics industry due to its
strong temporal and spatial isolation capability for safety-critical real-time systems. Although multi-core systems are
receiving wide attention from the avionics industry, the fundamental challenge to integrating an existing set of singlecore
IMA partitions into a multi-core system is to ensure that the isolation of the partitions will be maintained without
incurring huge redevelopment and recertification costs. In connection with meeting this challenge, several issues arise
such as speed differences between single-core systems and multi-core systems and synchronization for exclusive I/O
transactions. To address these challenges, we have developed an optimized Multi-IMA partition scheduling algorithm
which considers exclusive regions to achieve the synchronization between partitions across cores. We show that the
problem of finding the optimal Multi-IMA partition schedule is NP–complete and present a Constraint Programming
formulation. In addition, we relax this problem to find the minimum number of cores needed to schedule a given set
of partitions and propose an approximation algorithm which is guaranteed to find a feasible schedule of partitions if
there exists a feasible schedule of exclusive regions.